Illustration showing the evolution of the interior of the planet Mars. At the start of the sequence (left) Mars has a silicate magma ocean (orange) and metallic core (yellow). The second panel shows the core has evolved into a solid inner core and a ...

Illustration showing the evolution of the interior of the planet Mars. At the start of the sequence (left) Mars has a silicate magma ocean (orange) and metallic core (yellow). The second panel shows the core has evolved into a solid inner core and a ...

Illustration showing the evolution of the interior of the planet Mars. At the start of the sequence (left) Mars has a silicate magma ocean (orange) and metallic core (yellow). The second panel shows the core has evolved into a solid inner core and a ...

Artwork of an imaginary planetary nebula. This is a glowing shell of gas cast off by a star near the end of its life. The star can be seen at the centre of the nebula. The Sun will one day form a planetary nebula, once its internal stock of hydrogen ...

This once normal star, having exhausted its internal supply of hydrogen, has expanded, growing into a gargantuan caricature of its former self called a red giant. It is dozens or hundreds of times its original size. Any nearby planets will be engulfe...

A surface mass ejection (SME), depicted in this illustration, is a relatively recently discovered phenomenon in stellar astrophysics. They are similar to coronal mass ejections but on a far larger scale. During an SME, a star can release hundreds of ...

An artist's impression of the Milky Way galaxy colliding with Andromeda. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is moving towards the Andromeda galaxy. Astronomers predict that in about 4 billion years, the two galaxies will collide and begin to merge. The Solar...

Astronomers at NOIRLab (Tucson, Arizona, USA) have detected what they believe is the first sighting of the destruction of a gas giant planet caused by the expansion of its ageing red giant star. All sun-like stars expand as their nuclear fuel runs ou...

... f a planet from one star to another, more massive star. They find that this occurs on average once in the first 10Myr of the evolution of a star-forming region, and that the semimajor axes of the hitherto confirmed BEAST planets (290 and 556 AU) are ...